genocide

In a Wednesday interview with Andrea Mitchell, Secretary of State John Kerry resisted Mitchell's assertion that "genocide" was taking place in Syria:

QUESTION: I want to ask you about Syria. For three years, we have watched horrific pictures. You spoke of this when you were a senator. Obviously, now you’ve got the lead role on it. Horrible pictures. I looked at video of a child weeping over his mother’s body after a barrel bomb was dropped on her and other civilians by the regime. Just today, this picture on the wires from Yarmouk, from the refugee camp in southern Damascus. Why isn’t this genocide?

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, Andrea, that gets into all kinds of definitions. What it is is wholesale killing of your own people. And --

QUESTION: But it’s killing of one or another ethnic group by a minority leadership.

SECRETARY KERRY: Again, I don’t want to get into the definitions. What he is doing is outrageous, unconscionable, unacceptable, disgraceful, craven. It’s horrendous. And we all know that; everybody knows that. And President Obama has been deeply committed to trying to make a difference in ways that we have chosen within the law that we believe are appropriate and permissible...

In 2004, then-presidential candidate Kerry was not as reticent about defining the situation in Darfur as genocide during an address to the NAACP convention (via Bloomberg):

Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, said the Bush administration should stop ``equivocating'' and formally label as genocide the attacks in Darfur, which have killed up to 80,000 people and displaced more than 1 million.

``These government sponsored atrocities should be called by their rightful name -- genocide,'' Kerry said in an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in Philadelphia. ``The government of Sudan and the people of Darfur must understand that America stands prepared to act, in concert with our allies and the UN, to prevent the further loss of innocent lives.''

Recent estimates of the conflict in Syria place the death toll around 140,000, with another half-million injured, and millions displaced.

During hearings yesterday to reconfirm Gen. Martin Dempsey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sen. John McCain pushed Dempsey to find out where he stands on Syria. McCain noted that Dempsey supported arming the Syrian rebels in February and then changed his mind in April. "How do we account for those pirouettes?" McCain asked.

Death and rebirth in the shadow of genocide.

As Chris Bohjalian tells it, the years between 1915 and 1923 were “the most nightmarish eight years of Armenian history.” Yet the horrific events of that time are generally not included in history courses, and are not so well known outside the Armenian community. No longer. Bohjalian describes what happened to the Armenians in grisly detail in this compelling novel.

The president doesn't acknowledge the Armenian genocide.

Connoisseurs of tea leaves will note that President Obama, in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day, was very careful to avoid use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War.

A definition of genocide that makes sense of history.

Why did ethnic riots between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks suddenly erupt in Osh and Jalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan, driving almost half a million people from their homes, leaving nearly 200 dead, and injuring thousands?

Genocide.

The nation of Kyrgyzstan is burning right now. Hundreds of ethnic Uzbeks have died at the hands of marauding bands of ethnic Kyrgyz, with 100,000 more fleeing the country. The eyes of the world have rightly turned to a part of the world normally considered a backwater.